Tuesday, June 24, 2008

I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, largely among Mormon kids for whom swearing was taboo. From a young age I learned that bad words could get you into a little bit of trouble, but I never had my mouth washed out with soap or anything so dramatic. At worst I was lectured by my best friend's mom at age six or seven when said friend repeated a word I'd thrown out during an incident a few days earlier, calling an older kid "fuckface." Who knows where the hell I got that one?

Even then I knew how tremendously liberating curse words were, and that feeling only grew when I moved across town a few years later, into a more heterogeneous but also more clique-based scene. In the fourth and fifth grades, nearly every recess at school featured a football game pitting the Mormon kids against the non-Mormon ones (with one charitable, athletically-endowed exception to even things out). By then, my grandfather had already provided me with a copy of Ball Four, with its infamously bold use of swear words, including the innovatively recombinant "shitfuck," my all-time favorite. Socially isolated from the pretty kids, swearing became a weapon, a tool to mark turf. You could call a Mormon kid who was hassling you (and brother, I had plenty of hassle) a fucker or a shithead or an asshole, and chances are you wouldn't be called that back. Sure, you might get popped in the face with a fist, but you'd still have the satisfaction of landing a blow, too. For a scrawny scrapper like me, that would have to do.

So please, enjoy the title link above (the original "Seven Words" routine from his 1972 album Class Clown) and this 1978 update from George Carlin Again. Safe for work? Are you fucking kidding me? Let it all hang out: